Highway Tragedies
To many Americans, the I-35W disaster wasn’t an isolated tragedy, but the latest in a barrage of infrastructure failures—from the northeastern blackout in 2003 and the breached New Orleans levees in 2005 to falling concrete in Boston’s Big Dig in 2006. Perhaps the nation had passed a tipping point and was entering a period of steep physical decline.?
"The U.S. highway system is broken. And it’s not clear where the money is going to come from to fix it.”?
Amid a steady rise in congestion and ongoing deterioration of decades-old roads and bridges, federal and state funding is failing to keep up with the need to maintain existing infrastructure and increase capacity. And the cash shortfall is only going to get worse, with the Federal Highway Trust Fund—supported by a tax on gasoline—projected to run dry in 2009.
“There is crumbling infrastructure all over the country,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada?
Forty-five percent of the money spent on American roads comes to the states from the Federal Government.
The list of projects in need of repair is extensive, according to TRIP, a national transportation research group:
- 33% of the nation’s major roads are in "poor or mediocre condition."
- 36% of major urban highways are congested.
- 26% of bridges are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.”
One reason for the backlog is that funding for highway repair and improvements hasn’t kept up with rising construction and maintenance costs, which have far outstripped the overall inflation rate. Higher oil prices have raised the cost of asphalt and the diesel fuel need to power road-building equipment.
Thanks to the surging price of materials like petroleum and steel, the cost to build highways has jumped 43% since the beginning of 2004.
Americans need to face the sobering reality that the country’s infrastructure is in trouble. Most of it was built in the 20th century, during the greatest age of construction the world has seen. The continent was wired for electricity and phone service, and colossal projects, including the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge and the interstate highway system, were completed.
We're leasing our roads to foreign investors, who plan to turn them into toll roads:
- Loaded with investor cash, companies are buying leases of public highways, bridges and tunnels from states desperately trying to improve infrastructure.
- Chicago enriched its treasury by $1.8 billion by selling a 99-year lease of the Chicago Skyway to Spanish roads operator Cintra and Australian bank Macquarie. At about the same time, Texas bagged $1.2 billion to let a Cintra-led consortium build the first part of the Trans-Texas Corridor and collect tolls on it for 50 years.
“U.S. infrastructure needs lots and lots of capital, and it’s not obvious where all that money is going to come from.”—Murray Bleach President of Macquarie Holdings, USA
There is a much better way. Imagine a highway infrastructure that relieves the financial obligations of the federal and state governments (taxpayers) and instead pays for itself. The Solar Roadways™ generate electricity - three times more than the entire U.S. currently uses (see The Numbers). The electricity generated pays for the Solar Roadways™. Additional revenue can be acquired by leasing the conduit within the Solar Roadways™ to service providers such as the telephone, cable TV, and high-speed internet industries.
The Nation’s highway transportation system includes 3.8 million miles of roadways, 582,000 bridges, and 54 tunnels over 500 meters in length. Significantly, the highway system supports 86 percent of all our citizens' personal travel, moves 80 percent of the Nation’s freight (based on value), and serves as a key component in national defense mobility. Despite widespread redundancies, there are critical junctures with limited capacity for additional traffic. Freight volume is projected to double by 2020, stretching the Nations’ ability to manage limited capacity and growing security concerns.
“Security concerns” includes terrorism. We haven’t seen it yet in this country, but we've all seen the news reports about suicide bombers boarding crowded buses and detonating themselves. It's horrific enough that they take the innocents onboard with them, but imagine if they strategically blew up a bus, or better yet, a truck loaded with hazardous materials in a busy tunnel or bridge or in a congested downtown area.
We've all seen semi-trucks traveling down the highway with their Hazardous Materials signs. Loaded with thousands of gallons of flammable and/or toxic materials, imagine the damage that a deranged mind with a bag full of explosives and no respect for life could arrange. Wait until the truck driver pulls over, commandeer the 18-wheel powder keg and make the headlines.
Currently, it's difficult to track these vehicles, other than by radio. The Solar Roadways™ form a wide area network, with each individual Solar Road Panel™ containing a microprocessor board with its own address. Think of the Solar Roadways™ as the internet, with each individual Solar Road Panel™ acting as an online computer. If we place RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags on the vehicles that we want to track, the Solar Roadways™ would track them in real time and we'd know exactly where they were at all times.
If the trucker in the example above was able to get off a distress signal, or if the truck varied from its intended route, authorities could be alerted quickly and have a good chance of thwarting an impending disaster.
Almost 8 million large trucks are registered in the U.S. 39,000 public buses and 460,000 school buses also share the road.
In summation, the Solar Roadway™ provides an intelligent and secure highway infrastructure that pays for itself.
Dover Bridge
They’re among “The 10 Pieces of U.S. Infrastructure We Must Fix Now,” according to a special report published by Popular Mechanics. The report is available on the magazine’s Web site and will be published in its May issue.
The Dover Bridge occupies the seventh spot on the list.
“Idaho’s Dover Bridge sees about 5,000 vehicles per day, and we don’t envy the drivers. The bridge scored an outrageously low 'sufficiency rating' of 2 out of 100 in the National Bridge Inventory,” the entry reads.
This one hits particularly close to home: this bridge is right outside of Sandpoint and about 20 minutes from the Solar Roadways™ lab. Sandpoint is in north Idaho, roughly one hour from the Canadian border. Dead center: you drive 30 minutes east and you're in Montana. Drive 30 minutes west, and you're in Washington. If you go west, you cross the Dover bridge.
Chicago’s traffic-congestion breeding Circle Interchange tops the list, followed by the Brooklyn Bridge, the canal lock in New Orleans, Atlanta’s water system, Seattle’s viaduct and the Herbert Hoover Dike on Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Kentucky’s Wolf Creek Dam, the river levees in Sacramento, California, and O’Hare International round out the top 10.
The steel truss bridge at Dover was built in 1937. An Idaho Transportation Department inspection report from 2006 lists the bridge structure condition as “intolerable.” The deck condition is deemed “serious” and the substructure and superstructure are listed as “poor.”
The bridge closed briefly in January 2007 after a 30-by-30-inch chunk of concrete broke loose and was found dangling by its rebar.
Sources:
US highways badly in need of repair by John W. Schoen, Senior Producer, MSNBC - updated August 3, 2007
? Rebuilding America Special Report: How to Fix U.S. Infrastructure by Erik Sofge and the Editors of Popular Mechanics Published in the May 2008 issue
? BonnerCountyDailyBee.com by Keith Kinnaird Posted Thursday, April 10th, 2008
They Really Do Own the Road Time Magazine, by Barbara Kiviat, October 29, 2007
Highway Infrastructure and Motor Carrier Modal Annex